![]() Furthermore, the forest’s location alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway suggests the symbolic richness of the parkway project in the imaginations of North Carolinians in the 1930s and 1940s. This forest takes us back to a moment when conservative social groups actively supported environmental projects, understanding that the nation’s historic, cultural, and natural resources were inextricably connected. Yet Confederate memorials rarely took the form of forests. The markers they installed are still omnipresent at civic centers, university campuses, and other public spaces in the South. Viewed in this context, the memorial forest was a rather typical undertaking for its time – a moment when robust and active white women’s groups tasked themselves with what historianįitzhugh Brundage has described as a “coordinated fashioning of a public past.” As the living memory of the Civil War died along with veterans and non-combatants, this younger generation of women created a set of social and cultural memorial practices that invented and sustained a Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War, often framed by a longer history of EuroAmerican settlement in the Americas. The forest is one of several thousand Confederate memorials and monuments in the southern United States erected during the early twentieth century. Holbrook had stumbled upon the North Carolina Confederate Memorial Forest, established by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the early 1940s. But what was its significance to the people who planted it? I knew that two of those 125,000 trees were planted for them.” For Holbrook, the name and symbolic number of trees were sufficient for him to connect his ancestors, and consequently himself, to the forest. Explaining his connection to the forgotten forest, Holbrook remarked: “I have two great-grandfathers who served in the Confederate army. The marker for the memorial forest had long since disappeared, and Holbrook Holbrook had never heard of the forest, despite 33 years of work for the Forest Service and membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The guidebook said that a forest dedicated to the North Carolina veterans of the Confederacy stood somewhere along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Service Forest Ranger Jim Holbrook encountered a surprising reference in a tourist guidebook. Florence Hague Becker, President-General, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, 1936 ![]() If the highways and byways of the past attract you, search out its history and its records, and preserve its guideposts for others to note. Women’s Groups and Memorial Forests Along the Blue Ridge Parkway By Shannon Harvey ![]()
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